back in 2020 when Instagram rolled out reals their like scrolly video first Tik Tok type experience I don't know if you remember this but people were really mad Kylie Jenner for example one of the world's most famous people with over 400 million followers on Instagram posted to her audience stop trying to be Tik Tock I just want to see cute photos of my friends sincerely everyone and it really was everyone who thought that one of my favorite YouTubers Peter McKinnon posted a video around that time called the end of Instagram Adam misseri the head of
Instagram posted a video explaining these changes and if you look at the comments people were just livid not only were they Furious but they also were very clear that they didn't want this I'm just going to read you a random sampling of these comments it sucks you are ruining Instagram I want to see people I follow I don't want to see random pet videos or moders doing karate that is all stupid cancel reals stop trying to be Tik Tock I just hate being bombarded with recommendations which are 99% of no interest to me too many
reals you ruin the app because you desperately want to be a tick tock clown please keep Instagram the same literally just stop forcing reals and give us back what we loved about Instagram just go and scroll through some of these comments and you'll see what I mean there's 36,000 of them overwhelming negative but the most interesting thing to me about this entire situation is that these people were all wrong and they were really wrong since the introduction of reals Instagram usage is up by over 40% that was at the end of 2023 and on their
most recent earnings release in q1 2024 they announced that Real's usage was up by yet another 10% and with every J in Instagram usage metastock reaches a new all-time high so it turns out that people actually really do want stupid cat videos and toddlers doing karate in their feed they might say they don't or even think they don't but when given the choice they will watch them and to a degree far more than when the app just consisted of cute photos of your friends to me it's pretty remarkable that we can be so wrong about
about something as core to who we are as what we want to do with our own time right now the average American spends 1.5 hours on Instagram and Tik Tok per day but I bet you that if you were to go and poll people in the morning and ask them hey do you want to spend 1.5 hours today scrolling through Instagram and Tik Tok videos I bet you that many or most people would say no um certainly I would say no and while I would like to think that I am above being hooked on these
algorithms I am not I can tell you that much and like many of you I'm sure there have been plenty of times when I've opened Instagram just to respond to a friend's message and find myself in a video induced stuper that I snap myself out of half an hour later and I'm just kind of staring Around My Room thinking what just happened it's one thing if I choose to sit down and watch you know an hourlong lecture about how Ultra processed food is bad for you but it's entirely another when I sit down with the
intention of just writing a message to somebody and end up getting snookered into this infinite scroll video experience which I didn't even want in the first place I would just reflect to myself wow that was a waste of time even more important was not that it was a waste of time but the bigger thing was how I wasn't even in control of what I was doing with my own time look I think different people can have different conclusions about this type of experience but for me what it felt like was I was being cheated my
time was being literally stolen from me like how a slot machine gradually sucks out your money and these experiences got me thinking a little bit deeper about what it is that we really want in economics there's there's a famous difference between expressed preference and revealed preference you know expressed preference is what people tell you they want revealed preference is what they actually do and it turns out those two things are not always the same a perfect example of an expressed preference might be something like I want to eat more vegetables whereas a revealed preference might
be I actually eat cookies Instead This is certainly true for me for a good long time until I started losing weight a few months ago which you know you may have seen that video you know the UN reports that for 35% of all vegetables are thrown out every year and I couldn't find the statistics on what percentage of flaming hot cheetos are thrown out every year or what percentage of Oreos but um I bet you it's not very high you know and so I feel like with the internet we're all participants in this giant experiment
that we never signed up for and from the perspective of Wall Street the fact that we're all spending so much time scrolling is a great thing metastock is hitting new all-time highs every single day but from our perspective look I don't know about you but I personally resented all the time I was spending scrolling it wasn't even just that I resented the time wasted but I resented the fact that I wasn't even choosing to have my time taken from me in that way I was just waking up 700 in the morning to check on somebody's
message you know and then half hour later I'd be snapping out of it thinking to myself like what just happened you know I just got like smashed in the head by a baseball bat of infinite scroll I want wanted to be eating vegetables but I was getting tricked into eating cookies instead and by the way I think the analogy with food is such a strong one in the way that companies have engineered these fast food Delights to be so appealing to our taste buds that we just eat and eat and eat and overeat and get
obese just like I did and we didn't even know how we became obese but all of a sudden we're obese and I think the same exact thing holds for social media we just scroll and scroll and scroll and all of a sudden we're spending hours on our phones scrolling every day and like where did that come from I decided that I was going to do something about this and so right around the same time I started to aggressively lose weight by not eating cookies and eating only vegetables I also decided to start getting control back
over my own attention and so I decided to almost completely stop using the internet that's kind of The Click baity version of what I did because I did still message my friends and family and send messages and emails for work etc which you know technically does count as the internet so I guess a more accurate way of saying what I did was that I stopped using algorithms I removed Instagram Facebook Tik Tok etc for my phone and to keep in touch with my family and friends what I did instead was I just bookmarked a link
to the Instagram Direct message pages in my browser so I wouldn't even have to open the app if I wanted to message them I wanted to avoid that like Judo that Instagram does when you open the app just to send a message to your friends and all of a sudden like boom it's you know these videos are coming at you so I just did all my messaging from my web browser instead and the other thing that I did which actually for me was an even bigger deal than getting rid of Instagram and Facebook I stopped
reading the news online completely cuz for me actually Google News was an even bigger problem than Instagram was it's the same kind of infinite scroll experience but the way that always felt about news the thing with Instagram was like I had enough self-control to be able to notice when I was falling down this Rabbit Hole of infnite scroll and I had better things to do than scroll watching these videos all the time so I'd be able to put the brakes and stop myself but where I didn't have self-control was over news consumption because to me
reading the news every day it felt like eating vegetables I'm just becoming a more informed citizen right you know I'm just reading news but what I actually realized scrolling through Google news it was just TiK ToK by another name it's essentially the same experience as mindlessly scrolling through Instagram it's kind of like how Shake Shack positions itself as fancy more artisanal version of McDonald's in reality the food at Shake Shack is as bad for you or worse for you than the food at McDonald's doesn't the infinite scroll through the news actually give you more knowledge
and make you an informed citizen sure they're tricking you but they're just tricking you into eating vegetables right that was what I thought too but the more that I reflected the more that I realized that that type of Daily News consumption actually is not eating your vegetables instead it's mindless entertainment of the same variety that you're going to encounter on Tik Tok a perfect example of this I think is the Sam Altman drama Sam Alman the founder of chat gbt he was initially dismissed by the board which was front page news in all major world
newspapers then a day later Microsoft hires Sam mman and a day after that open AI fires and hires a totally different CEO and he was eventually brought back all within 5 days to the same exact situation 5 days prior he's fired and replaced and brought back multiple times with so much drama but the end result is absolutely nothing has changed so I could have learned the exact same information and be no less informed about the Sam Alman drama had I just been a weekly consumer of news rather than a daily consumer of news I just
pick up the paper once a week and I find out that Sam Altman was dismissed and came back so what I started to think about with Daily News was how I was being hooked in for the purpose of Google to increase its engagement with their news apps and I was being like again Judo into these emotional psycho dramas that I I didn't want to participate in like why do I care if Sam Alman is dismissed and and then he's brought back oh but then he's dismissed again but then he's brought back again oh no I
don't I don't care why why do I I have to be involved in that drama and the emotional impact on my attention is so great when I follow the vacillations of the story of Sam Alman the head of the world's hottest company being dismissed and brought back and being dismissed and brought back again it was this emotional drain on me that I just didn't want to participate in anymore and so I also deleted the news app for my phone and I deleted the news widgets for my computer so when I opened my computer in my
morning I wouldn't have like a blast of headlines I actually read the news the oldfashioned way on a magazine once every week the only funny thing about this was that people would occasionally give me some spoilers on the news throughout the week in funny ways like they would say oh so what did you think about the president's reaction to this major world event that just happened I was like wait wa wait what major world event but I didn't really mind that because honestly the gains that I got from just not having this emotional burden the
very unnecessary emotional burden of following these daily headlines that I just didn't need in my life the most valuable part of this whole experience was just seeing how removing these things from my life after I removed them I I didn't miss them the initial window for the experiment was I was just planning for it to be a few weeks after the experiment ended um I did bring the apps back to my phone but I actually don't uh use them anymore I mean like today my Instagram usage is like 2 minutes it just showed me how
much these apps actually don't add to my life and so I no longer really have cravings for them you know particularly the news I just honestly feel way better about my own news consumption and how I use my attention but of course I just have more free time to spend with my kids or working which I love to do or working out or yes even watching videos you know I don't think there's anything wrong actually with watching videos you know if I want to sit down and watch a 2hour debate between slav Jack and Jordan
Peterson you know like I can do that and not feel bad about it but I have to consciously make that choice and I didn't want that choice to be made for me by YouTube or by Instagram or by [Music] Facebook
